Electronic slide presentations are a common way to present information to one or more viewers. Slide presentation software (e.g. PowerPoint®) facilitates the creation of multimedia documents incorporating text, images, audio and/or visual clips for presentation in one or more slides. Often the documents are presented in a slideshow, displaying the slides sequentially. The slides may be displayed to a display screen of a computing device (e.g. personal computer) or remotely via a presentation device such as a projector for projecting the presentation to a remote screen.
More particularly, portable electronic devices such as wireless mobile devices (cellular phones, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), etc.) among others, may include a viewer for displaying slide presentations in multiple display modes, such as a text mode for displaying text information distilled from the slides, a preview mode for displaying thumbnail slide images rendered from the slides and a mixed mode for displaying both text information and thumbnail slide images together. The slide presentation viewer may also include a slide show mode to display the slide images in full screen along with an interface (e.g. menu) for selecting among the multiple modes and for invoking and controlling the slide show. For handheld wireless communication devices in particular, a network server may process slide presentation documents to generate the text information and slide images for communicating to wireless devices equipped with appropriate slide presentation viewers. The network server may be an attachment server providing services for email attachments and the slide presentation viewers may be attachment viewers for email or dedicated viewers for presentations.
Handheld communication devices may also be capable of remotely controlling display of an electronic slide presentation. For example, a presentation mode of operation may be provided for wirelessly controlling display of a slide presentation on a remote presentation device. When controlling a presentation in this fashion, the slides being displayed on the handheld electronic device are the same as those displayed on the presentation device.
Therefore, a communication channel must be maintained between the handheld device and remote presentation device in order for the presentation to continue. If the handheld device moves out of range of the remote presentation device, or otherwise loses its ability to communicate with the remote presentation device, the communication channel is lost and the presentation will stop.